Judge throws out libel suit against Miami Herald

Published: Sunday, December 05, 1999

MIAMI {AP} A judge has thrown out a former mayor's suit against The Miami Herald, saying that it is a columnist's right to call a politician "loony."

Florida Circuit Court Judge Amy Dean said Carl Hiaasen's characterization of former Mayor Xavier Suarez as "loony," "deranged," "crazy" and "paranoid" in a December 1997 column were opinion and were not purported to be fact.

Dean, in a decision issued Thursday, also dismissed Suarez's allegations against former Herald political editor Tom Fiedler.

He had written that Suarez "likened the state's control over (Miami) to the Nazi takeover of France in World War II." Suarez said he never made such a comment.

Dean said Fiedler, now the Herald's editorial pages editor, was offering "rhetorical hyperbole" and "a libel suit must be based on fact," she said.

Nor did the comment defame Suarez, she said.

Suarez, who was mayor through most of the 1980s, filed the suit earlier this year shortly after the Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing fraud in the 1997 municipal election that returned him to office.